1869-1870 Around the World Letters

Eight chapters in Roughing It were derived from a
series of "travel letters" MT originally wrote in 1869-1870
for the Express, the Buffalo, New York, paper that
he was a part-owner and editor of right after his marriage.
They were intended to wind up in a book, but not
Roughing It. MT himself described the plan (and
explains the reason I have to put "travel letters" in
quotation marks) in an introduction he wrote to "Letter No.
1":

I am just starting out on a pleasure trip around the
globe, by proxy. That is to say, Professor D. R.
Ford, of Elmira College, is now making the journey for
me, and will write the newspaper account of his (our)
trip. No, not that exactly -- but he will travel and
write letters, and I shall stay at home and add a dozen
pages to each of his letters. One of us will furnish the
fancy and the jokes, and the other will furnish the
facts. I am equal to either department, although
statistics are my best hold.

MT wound up publishing ten letters in the
paper, the first eight of which he wrote himself after he
realized that Professor Ford wasn't going to write very
often. Two of the letters are entirely fanciful (No. 2 is
called "Adventures in Hayti," and No. 8, set on Easter
Island, is called "Dining with a Cannibal" -- MT never
visited either island), but the other six describe
California and Nevada with the same blend of realism and
humor that made Innocents Abroad so popular and that
would serve as the aesthetic formula for much of
Roughing It too.

You can read those six letters here, along with an
interactive feature that will allow you to compare them with
the book: clicking on the ROUGHING IT
ICON (left) whenever you see it will bring
up a side-by-side comparison of the two texts, so you can see
for yourself the kinds of revisions MT made.

As you'll see when you compare, in many cases the
Roughing It text follows the newspaper text very
closely, though MT may move the parts around (the first half
of Letter No. 4, for example, ends up in Chapter 57, and the
second half in Chapter 37). Most drastically changed is
Letter No. 7's accounts of the Chinese and the outlaws in the
West. And nowhere to be seen in the newspaper versions is the
first-person protagonist of Roughing It: the hapless
tenderfoot whose naivetés and ineptitudes are the
occasion for so much of the book's comedy. The COMPARE feature will let you see, for
example, how he was added to the end of Letter No. 4's
description of the elusive Whiteman and his cement
mine.